Wes Anderson Gives a Tour of ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’

Wes Anderson at the 2014 SXSW Festival on March 10, 2014 in Austin, Texas.

Getty Images

Wes Anderson‘s new movie “The Grand Budapest Hotel” opened strongly in the U.S. last weekend in limited release. According to the website Box Office Mojo, the film has so far brought in $1,062,176 on just four screens. Anderson, the director behind such movies as “Fantastic Mr. Fox ” and “Rushmore,” recently sat down for a wide-ranging interview about his new movie, which stars Ralph Fiennes, Bill Murray, Edward Norton, and others.

Who are the filmmakers you feel you have learned the most from?

Wes Anderson: Well for this movie in particular, I’ve always thought maybe the biggest influences were middle European directors, directors from Berlin or Vienna who made their way to California and did Hollywood movies that are set in places like Budapest and Prague and Warsaw. Particularly Lubitsch, but there are so many directors who fall into that category, like Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder and Rouben Mamoulian – there are a couple of Mamoulian films that we thought of quite often during this movie. And then also maybe the Max Ophuls and Jean Renoir movies I think are connected to this one. We stole ideas from them anyway.

In Berlin you mentioned Stefan Zweig as an influence. Are there any books out there you’d love to adapt?

Well, I’m not sure what book I want to adapt, but I have lots and lots of favorite writers. I think in relation to this, Zweig above all others. But there are a couple of other ones. Did you ever read Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky? That book I found very inspiring in relation to this movie. And I’m just reading right now a little book called Utz by Bruce Chatwin. And that one has all kind of interesting links to this story as well.

In the case of this story the way that M. Gustave, the character who Ralph Fiennes plays, talks is really modeled on a real person who’s an old friend. As much as anything, it’s just the way he talks. But there are also poems and things like that that he’s reciting, that he’s meant to have memorized. And Jeff Goldblum’s character talks in this dramatic legal language. They’ve all got their different directions. Whereas the character played by Toni Revellori, Zero, the lobby boy, well he doesn’t really say much at all.

I was interested in the poems that Ralph Fiennes recited. Where are they from?

This is a little pastiche. I just made them up. They don’t exist beyond that. None of them get very far.

In this film, as in many of your works, there is an emphasis on the handcrafted: rear-projection, stop-motion animation and hand-drawn backdrops. What draws you to such techniques? Would you ever consider making a 3-D film?

I’m just interested in those old techniques. I think that they have certain charm. More or less, whatever’s in the movie is what I’m most interested in exploring and making an experience out of. I don’t know if I have a reason for it. If I had thought of a story like Gravity, I expect that I would be inclined to tell it in a different way. Not that I could ever come close to doing what Alfonso Cuaron did. But certain kinds of stories call for a more hi-tech, state-of-the-art treatment and the kind of stories I do maybe get something out of using something where you can sort of see how the magic tricks are accomplished.

With so many returning actors in your films, the cast seems to constitute a little family. Do you get together off-set?

It sort of depends on which one. I think on most of them, the chance to make a movie together is when we get to see each other. Often what really happens is we work together on the movie and then when the movie is coming out there’s a certain amount of running around together that everybody gets to do, but it totally depends which person we’re talking about. But it’s very fun gathering a group like that together to make a movie like this, because it’s a very communal, family atmosphere.

Do you have a dream project? Something crazy or ambitious that you want to do before you die?

Well, I can’t say that I have a thing that I’ve sort of set aside. I mean, usually what I have is, I have the next thing in mind. That’s really about as far as I’ve ever got. But I do have that vaguely…but that’s pretty rough at the moment.

So, no Don Quixote?

No Don Quixote, but that would be a good one. I feel that we’re still kind of waiting for the great Don Quixote. I mean, we had the Terry Gilliam one that didn’t pan out and we had the Orson Welles one that didn’t pan out. And where’s the one that did pan out? Is there one?

Do you prefer watching new movies or old ones?

I probably saw more or less all the big new movies that are all competing for all the prizes and everything now. But mostly I think I watch older movies: lately, a lot of pre-code movies. I just was never that knowledgeable about that period of filmmaking and lately have seen so many interesting films from that period. Lots are quite wild ones, but there are also lots of comedies that have a different energy to them. So anyway, lately we’ve been watching a lot of them, including Lubitsch and William Wellman [who directed Wings, the first film to win the Best Picture Oscar in 1927]. And some of the Capra ones. The pre-code Capra versus the only slightly later ones are really radically different. There’s one called American Madness that I just saw. It’s with Walter Houston and not that it has no connection to what [Capra] does later, but it’s much more kind of adventurous. I think it has to do with that it was the beginning of talking movies and some of them seem so energized with this new combination of techniques and you really feel it.